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The Cah-Binn
An alien species native to the planet Cabina, which they share peacefully with the Church of Humanity Repentant. Physiology The Cah-Binn are birthed out of chitinous eggs as smooth skinned larvae with multiple tool-like appendages. Their young start out making their own chitin out of their own eggshells. Competing with their siblings for scraps and material. These tool-like appendages fuse with the chitin and become their legs and arms, either fused together for strength or separated for precision. This project of making their own protection is a never ending cycle of improving their exoskeletal frame, and their parents often find material to put alongside the eggs so as to ensure their young start off differing widely from each others, however the creation process is a somewhat unified affair which means they all resemble various insectoid entities. As their chitinous forms grow bigger and bigger they craft ever more extravagant and delightfully inspiring designs, often to the point of sacrificing efficiency and practicality for the sake of satisfying their need for expression. Given their immensely frail forms, a squishy protein-based larval form with big eyes, they don't ever thread outside their exoskeletal frames except when they feel perfectly safe to do so. Culture The Cah-Binn are crafters of the highest degree. They take immense pleasure in crafting their chitonous forms, some writing the history of their various stages of transformation into the hardened substances they've procured over the years. Their society is highly hierarchical and status-driven, with the quality of one's hand-crafted chitinous form being a prime criteria for the amount of status given to an individual. The criteria by which the quality of a Cah-Binn's chitin is judged, however, is nigh-impossible for humans to understand. Many Cah-Binn have tried to explain it, but except for perhaps the Church's most gifted anthropology professors, no human has ever truly understood. The most people come away with is understanding that 'the angle of bloat is very important' but that it is not as important as 'the inside of the edge center's outside'. Diplomats are trained to nod politely and say positive things about the colors. This has led to various human-jokes among the Cah-Binn, which are only slightly less incomprehensible than their aesthetic explanations. The Cah-Binn strive to pursue intellectual endeavors as a matter of expressing their individuality. It lets them unveil not only their, sometimes impractically, self made exoskeletal frames, but also dazzle people with the brilliance of their minds and the sharpness of their wits. Due to this need for individual expression, and a constant need to improve their exoskeletal frames to one-up each other and improve their status, the Cah-Binn tend to specialize their frames towards one area of expertise. So that they can design their forms in unique ways none of their peers can match. In addition, it is not rare to see their immense capacity for adaptation to various systems or modes of technological improvement enhanced further by the use of custom made tools. The conflict with humanity introduced new kinds of thoughts never known to them before. For instance, they remain baffled by the idea that one species is somehow inferior to another. Cah-Binn culture understands status and hierarchy as centered on the individual, not groups as a whole. The Cah-Binn concept of community is centered not on exclusion and inclusion, but expansion and absorption. A Cah-Binn generally considers their own and their community's well-being as directly correlated to the size of the community and the density of ties of kin- and friendship between its members. In other words, in Cah-Binn culture, the bigger a community is, the better, with no exception. After the settlement of Cabina by the Church of Humanity Repent, many Cah-Binn desired to express kinship with their human neighbors, which has introduced several human-inspired exoskeletal fashion trends in the population. For example, standing on two legs rather than a supportive 6 or even 12 legged frame. As human settlers introduced materials from alien fauna like bird feathers, many Cah-Binn incorporated them into their designs, and there has been a resurgence in items such as long membranous wings allowing for all kinds of new and wondrous patterns. This almost parasitic empathy and need to express kinship is likely one of the reasons the species has been able to survive and thrive as much as they have in this human-dominated sector. Technology The Cah-Binn possess a roughly T4+ level of technological understanding. However unlike human technology, the Cah-Binn eschew all forms of mass production. Cah-Binn technology is always flavored by the creator, and lovingly hand-crafted to serve the specific needs of the specific Cah-Binn it was designed by or for. Cah-Bin Housing The Cah-Binn having transended beyond their limited primitive days have developed a distinctive ways of living nested inside metal jurts/lodges that bear familial markings shaped by the family elder at the inception of its creation. The outer layer of the structure is at least 20 foot thick, capable of withstanding conventional nuclear bombardment from orbit, and the structure has its own internal atmosphere and air filtration Each family dome is separated by a 20-kilometer distance between it and the next family dome. The structure is usually large enough to act as the marker for the territory. The floor has a passage that leads deeper into the structure below ground like a submarine or a bunker with multiple layers and hatches and holes for Cah-Bin burrowing and "Churning" towards the planetary core. The occupied ground around the dome experiences the act of being "churned" by the Cah-Bin family on a rotational basis. Churning Churning is referring to an act whereby rock and earth is ground up into a semi-fluid state and the surface begins to shake and split apart. The act of "churning" ground is by virtue of the technology used limited to a square of two kilometers at the time. The sound emitted by the Cah-Bin underground "churning" device is a deep and energetic bass growl that can be heard up from a few kilometers distance of the Cah-Bin family unit's territory. Most entities above ground are quick to find out when and where the device is in effect and depart long before it begins the process of harvesting minerals from the soil. This sound is usually what demarcates that the Cah-Bin family unit's territory is occupied by a living family. History Before humanity's arrival in the sector, the Cah-Binn had settled a handful of worlds surrounding Cabina. Humanity destroyed these settlements, and the final treaty the Cah-Binn were forced to sign forbade them from settling anywhere outside of the Benilli system. After the Scream, the Cah-Binn believed that the original treaty had become null and void, and founded several small outposts in the sectors surrounding Cabina, while sending out merchant ships to engage in trade with the humans and remaining aliens of the sector. Humanity did consider this a breach of the original treaty. But as the outposts were small and posed no threat, and the trade was profitable to all involved, nothing was done beyond lodging a formal protest and using the issue to rile up anti-alien sentiment whenever it was politically convenient to some imperial faction or the other. During the reign of the Blood Eagle The Cah-Binn were an obvious target, but when the Aquilan Emperox sent his imperial troops out to cleanse the Cah-Binn outposts, and embargo the Cah-Binn trade ships. He met with more resistance than was expected. The Cah-Binn outposts were reinforced with garrisoned defenders, and their trade ships were as varied as their exoskeletal frames. This uniqueness proved to be more than humanity had initially bargained for. As a result of the increased resilience to imperial tactics, the imperial military forewent a ground invasion of Cabina, instead opting to request the imperial navy for months of orbital bombardments that scarred the planetary surface until the Cah-Binn found a way to communicate their unconditional surrender. For a brief period, an imperial garrison was deployed on the planetary surface, establishing a permanent human colony on the planet called Lux Gravare. They left soon after the Blood Eagle's death in 2955 but the colonists stayed, and when the founders of the Church of Humanity Repentant were looking for safe harbour to put into practice their ideas Cabina soon became an obvious choice. Though understandably wary at first, the Cah-Binn begrudgingly accepted these 'repentant' humans' presence, though the devastation visited upon them by humanity was, and still remains, fresh in the Cah-Binn's cultural memory, over time many have come to trust their human neighbors. Helping build this trust was that part of the Church's offer of reconciliation was a promise: If anyone ever seeks to bombard the Cah-Binn again, they'll have to bombard millions of humans who will fight alongside them. Today, the human population outnumbers that of the Cah-Binn, and though the two species largely live in separate communities relations between the communities are good. Category:Aliens